Yakov B. Zeldovich

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association with

Khariton

Khariton and his colleague
Yakov B. Zeldovich were quick to respond to the discovery of fission with a series of papers published in 1939–41. In February 1943, Laboratory No. 2 was established by decree of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, with Igor V. Kurchatov as its head. Kurchatov recruited Khariton to work with him. While the project remained relatively small for the duration of World...

Sunyaev

Russian-German astrophysicist who, with Soviet physicist Yakov Zeldovich, first proposed the Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect, in which distortions in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are caused by clusters of galaxies. With Russian astrophysicist Nikolay Shakura, he also developed the Shakura-Sunyaev model, which describes the accretion of matter onto a black hole.

quasars

The right answer—accretion by gravity onto supermassive black holes—was proposed shortly after Schmidt’s discovery independently by Russian astronomers Yakov Zel’dovich and Igor Novikov and Austrian American astronomer Edwin Salpeter. The combination of high luminosities and small sizes was sufficiently unpalatable to some astronomers that alternative explanations were posited that...